You can't catch a fish unless your hook is in the water, or so the saying goes. Professional fishermen can take that adage one step further—that is you can't make money catching fish unless your hook is in the water. Professional fishing circuits are highly competitive and the difference between finishing a tournament in the money versus just spending a lot of money to be in a tournament often comes down to the amount of time during tournament hours that a fisherman is able to devote to the business of fishing. Exercises such as tying on new baits, modifying equipment, fiddling with trolling motors and untangling marker buoys are necessary evils that take away from productive fishing time. Consequently, a typical tournament fisherman will employ any method or apparatus that will increase his efficiency while on the water.
Perhaps one of the most inconvenient and inefficient tasks that must be managed by a tournament fisherman is the process of culling his live well. In many fishing tournaments, there is a limit as to the number of fish that a competitor may bring to the scales. Therefore, when a tournament fishermen has boated the maximum number of fish allowed by the tournament, the process of culling the live well begins. Culling is nothing more than the process of releasing the smallest fish in the live well once a larger one is caught. Put another way, tournament fishermen are always “trading up” in an effort to increase the overall weight of their catch. As one can imagine, an exorbitant amount of valuable fishing time can be wasted trying to corner the smallest fish in the live well. In fact, if a tournament fisherman isn't careful, he'll end up doing most of his fishing in the live well instead of in the lake.
There are many products available to tournament fishermen to help improve the efficiency of managing the live well culling process. The most popular systems are usually a series of small, color coded buoys each tethered to a clipping apparatus. When a fish is caught, the fisherman threads a clip through the fish's mouth making sure that it exits the gills before locking the clip. The coded buoy, which is tethered to the clip, floats on top of the water in the live well thereby providing a quick and easy way to identify and remove a specific fish.
Buoy based culling systems such as the one outlined above are very simple, and generally efficient, solutions for live well management during a tournament. The shortfall of those systems, however, is experienced before the buoys are in ever in use. At the cost of valuable fishing time, inefficient organization and storage of the buoys can cause tethers to tangle and buoys to become lost.
Prior art techniques for management of culling buoys are inadequate. They do not facilitate the storage, order, and ease of access for the buoys. In a fishing environment, especially tournament fishing, it is imperative to be able to quickly access the culling buoys, cull the fish, and get back to the business of catching the next largest fish. Thus, there is a need in the art for a device to help hold culling buoys, provide ease of access to the culling buoys and maintain order.